Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday May 28, 2009 @02:58PM
from the john-doe dept.

A 62-year-old man visiting his relatives in the US was held for four hours by immigration officials after they could not detect his fingerprints because of a cancer drug he was taking. The man was prescribed capecitabine, a drug used to treat cancers in the head, neck, breast, and stomach. Some of the drug's side-effects include chronic inflammation of the palms or soles of the feet, which can cause the skin to peel or bleed. "This can give rise to eradication of fingerprints with time," explained Tan Eng Huat, senior consultant in the medical oncology department at Singapore's National Cancer Center. "Theoretically, if you stop the drug, it will grow back, but details are scanty. No one knows the frequency of this occurrence among patients taking this drug and nobody knows how long a person must be on this drug before the loss of fingerprints," he added.

Uh, what's that got to do with anything? When would that have been said during this exchange? I mean, customs officials don't say "we're from the government" and they DEFINITELY don't say "We're here to help you."

Nothing sounds good in German. The words "I love you" sound so guttural that most people start thinking back to certain speeches at Nuremberg a few decades ago;)

If you're saying it gutturally, you're saying it wrong. There are no guttural sounds in "Ich liebe Dich". The "ch" sound in those words is palatal -- this sound [wikipedia.org], not this sound [wikipedia.org].

Of course German is going to sound guttural and violent if all you listen to is people doing Hitler impressions. Real-life German is about as romantic-sounding as a language gets. (Note: I'm not German.)

In this case, why do they insist on fingerprints to identify someone?Sure, they might want to know if the person they are holding already has a record.If not, though, then certainly they are creating a new record, right?So, gather retinal scans, voice prints, DNA samples, whatever.Those will suffice if captured after doing something in the future.

Every international airport would have to

install retinal scanners,

install voice print analyzers,

have hundreds of mouth swabs on hand,

install uber-speed DNA analyzers, (can they even do it in the minutes needed?)

train the users to do it properly,

upgrade all the computers to add the new data types, and

new programming to use the new data.

And the billions of dollars to implement it.

All for a tiny percentage of the population.

Not to mention the HOWLS OF RAGE from privacy groups, the ACLU, the EU, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

Instead of knee-jerk reacting about how stupid the US government is, think about what you just wrote.

The US government is stupid, but this is just a case of a specific person being stupid (both the official and the poster you replied to).

Fingerprinting everyone who enters your country is only valid when you've already deteriorated civil liberties beyond the point of no return. I don't think turning your country into a police state for the sake of being "safe" is a reasonable scenario. The bottom line is that US foreign policy put the US in its current position, so maybe changing this might ensure safety.

The more the US moves toward this police state (and police the world attitude), the more people will be wrongly detained at airports, boarders, hell, even in other countries. This does not reflect well at all for the US or US citizens.

I suppose we should all burn our passports and submit ourselves to chipping? Fingerprinting is not and never will be a valid form of identifying innocent civilians. The only people in my country that get fingerprinted are people who are charged with a crime, not innocent people entering the country (or, now as a newer article shows, leaving the country).

Gee, that doesn't sound like a police state at all.

What kind of brainlessness is this which asserts that "fingerprinting" == "making sure you are who you say you are"?

Everybody who requires a security clearance also must submit to fingerprinting. There are countless other valid reasons for fingerprinting as well. Why do you think that only people being charged with a crime are the ones that submit to fingerprinting? How is it any worse than having your picture taken for your passport? The only difference is that they now have something to tie back to you. This is not a police state.

The US seems to love fingerprinting as a method of ID for some reason. In most countries, the only people that ever have their fingerprints taken are criminals.

I have security clearances to several Australian Federal Government departments (as an IT contractor). No fingerprints required. They just simply aren't used here as a method of ID.

The only people in the world who have my fingerprints, in fact, are the Americans, because I have travelled to the US and they take ALL TEN FINGERPRINTS of all visitors (?!?!!! that's still a serious wtf from me every time I think about it, even though I've gone through it a dozen times now)

I too am an Aussie, and I find the notion of fingerprinting innocents a gross violation of human rights. It seems the typical response to not wanting to be printed is "if you have nothing to hide you won't mind".

Well, my response is "if I am innocent then why am I being treated like a criminal"?

I know this conversation will go nowhere due to the hard line Americans hijacking it and defending the police state they live in. None are so jaded as the people who fully accept giving up their liberties and rights for the sake of "security"... no, I'm not going to do the full quote, but you get the picture.

I find the notion of fingerprinting innocents a gross violation of human rights.

Really? A gross violation of human rights is being sold into slavery. It's being denied personhood. It's having your local police force come by and rape your wife. It's being held indefinitely without charge and being subjected to torture. It's having all the children in your entire ethnic group rounded up and sent to boarding schools to be assimilated.

Being fingerprinted is a pointless invasion of privacy, and an inconvenience.

Protocol, and current law, requires fingerprinting for incoming foreigners. I think DNA should be a good alternative if fingerprints are not available. I wonder what the protocol is for a double arm amputee. What if they had just said, "Oh well, you look sick and you won't do anything, so we'll let you in."
What if they find out he's on cancer drugs because he's some sort of commie biochem guy and is now sick from that. He's dying and wants to do damage to America. He blows up a school. Oh, well, after a few years they'll find he wasn't printed coming into the country. Parents of kids killed sue because protocol wasn't followed, allowing a dangerous wanted person in the country, just because he was sick. Sickness does not beget special treatment. A plan B should be in place for this sort of thing.

What if you trip and fall on a sharp corner and poke your eye out? We should ban sharp corners! What if you trip and fall and hit your head on a wall? We should pad all our walls. Or better yet, ban walking or moving about of any kind. We should all be bound to soft beds. What if your teenage child is sexually attracted to a classmate? We should ban children.

We could play what if all day, but the point is, you can't keep everyone safe from everything all the time. You have to ask what freedoms are worth giving up for what safeties. I for one would be willing to give up a lot of the "safety" gained from our security theater for the freedom to get on an airplane without taking off my shoes.

On a side note, didn't we used to belittle commie's for being a "show me your papers" kind of state?

INterestng to note thatb the same evidence to convict him could be used to convicet any model rocket enthusiast.

Also note he was held for an extend time before trial, a complete violation of his do process.

The his confessions were used to convict someone else. I would love to see the transcripts of that conversation:"Do you know that this man was a terrorist?Yes.Convict him boys, this un trustworthy terrorist said this other person was guilty.

When was the last time a real terrorist was found in a border checkIn 2007 [guardian.co.uk], although the terrorist in question had been on ceasefire for a decade, and was by that stage a reasonably respectable member of the political establishment, and had been invited to the US to meet the President.

Arguably, Gerry Adams was never really even a terrorist, he was just on the political wing of an organisation that had terrorist connections. That is SInn Fein, never shot at anyone or bombed anyone. Gerry Adams political affiliations were well known as well as the fact that he was travelling under his own name.

Your sig is right on.Why is four hours a huge deal? I've waited longer than that due to weather, airlines overbooking, and other reasons. As long as they treated him decently for the four hours this should not be a big issue.

You are required to give fingerprints when you come to the US. The US is open and clear about that. This man entered the US without fingerprints. That would be roughly equivelent to a returning American without any identification. Would you plaster up "innocent American held for hours" or "idiot with no ID got what he deserved"? He traveled to the US missing a required item, fingerprints. That he was held for a short time (and yes, 4 hours is short when you are essentially in violation of US law, even with good reason) and released when his information could be checked out and verified. That's the system working. There are lots of things to complain about (like fingerprints being required in the first place) but to hold this up as an example of a failure of the system is absurd. To state that they held him for "no reason" is absurd. They had a good reason and held him no longer than necessary to address the issue.

These are low-wage worker bees. The one thing they know for sure is that they won't get into trouble if they follow protocol. Do you really expect them to think? I'm not saying I like the result, but it's clear to me that if a TSA worker has a choice between your discomfort resulting from following protocol, and his if he breaks protocol and the outcome catches somebody's attention, he'll stick with protocol every time.

Why not do both? Protocol is: get fingerprint. If you cannot get a fingerprint, then you should use your discretion and initiative, e.g.:- carefully and thoroughly interview the visitor.- understand and verify the person's reason for not having a fingerprint.- understand why the person is visiting the country.- determine whether this person is likely to be a risk or not.- decide if the person should be allowed into the country despite the lack of fingerprints.

If the border guards didn't want to think, they would have just deported him right away. They were willing to think. They did think. They interviewed him, thought about what he said,possibly spent some time verifying what he said, maybe consulted other people, and in the end they decided he was an acceptable risk. The process took 4 hours. It seems reasonable to me.

I think this shows a system working perfectly. The normal case (over 99% of the time, I would guess) is a few seconds for a fingerprint. The exceptions are dealt with on a case-by-case basis, with a thorough interview and careful consideration (not a stupid snap judgment).

Based on a true story and submitted for your critical evaluation, dear reader, I present "America: A Dialogue".

Alice: I can't believe people want to bring the 9/11 terrorists into the US.

Bob: Well, it's the right thing to do. We need to stop torturing them and give them fair trials.

Alice: But not here. They're too dangerous to bring into the country.

Bob:: If our prisons can hold Timothy McVeigh, they can hold anyone. And they're being tortured over there.

Alice: McVeigh is one thing, but if we hold Al Qaeda terrorists, their supporters will come down through Canada and bail them out of Fort Leavenworth. I think they're just too dangerous to keep here, and an island is much more secure anyway.

Bob: But our soldiers are behaving like monsters and torturing these people.

Alice: They deserve it anyway. They attacked us on 9/11. And the real monsters are on top*. Don't criticize our troops who are just trying to do their job. It must hard dealing with those people.

Bob: We don't know they've done anything. They've never been tried. And our troops are responsible for what they do. Didn't we decide that at Nuremberg?

Alice: We know they attacked us. These things happen during war. They happen all the time. My friend's father told me of some nasty stuff that happened in Korea. This is no big deal.

Bob: [dramatic facepalm, exit stage left]

[Curtain drops, Alice appears from behind it]

Alice: I'm so glad we elected someone who can rehabilitate our image in the world.

Simply because they're not paid to think. They're drones. If they started showing signs of unique thought and it turned out to be 'the wrong thing', then they'd be out of a job, replaced by another drone. Following protocol is greater assurance of continued employment.

More than that, I'm sure there's a natural screening process at work that gets rid of inquisitive people with good heads on their shoulders: the monotony of the job. Looking at people's passports all day has got to be one of the most boring jobs out there. Managing people who look at passports all day and dealing with people who have issues with their passports might be a little more interesting, except with all the paranoia I'm sure they're in a straightjacket and have little power to do anything that so

Well yeah. and the wheelchair doesn't go through x-ray nor does the person in it, plus you don't queue for security -- probably the quickest/easiest way to get airside short of wearing a police uniform.

When I lose my legs, I need to go to your airport. I've seen wheelchaired persons wait in line, and then be forced to get out of their wheelchair while TSA agents flipped the thing upside down to look at it, and then the person *walked* through the X-ray machine.

Obviously, this wouldn't be the case with a double amputee, but I think if you can walk, even a little bit, the "I'm going in a wheelchair" scheme won't save you any time...

I had a friend in high school whose family owned a catfish restaurant. He had been helping out at the restaurant for many years and by the time he was 17-18 had no discernible fingerprints either. It most certainly cannot be the first case where someone passed through without fingerprints. It is news because there was a single idiot working at that location and he couldn't be bothered to actually do any critical reasoning.

Fried catfish. His years of being burned by the oil had burned away the layer of skin responsible for fingerprints and built up scar tissue in its place. If you looked there were still fingerprint patterns; they just didn't form the typical ridges used for fingerprinting or leaving fingerprints.

I've fried a turkey; I guess I'm just smart enough not to fuck up my fingers (I use a digital thermometer so it is easy to tell when oil is too hot to touch). Also, the parent said nothing about fried catfish; I just figured it was some fresh fish place down by a lake.

The man was held for four hours to verify he wasn't a security threat, the excuse he gave wasn't listed in the product packaging for the drug he was taking and the report of this incident suggests that a letter from his doctors which he didn't have would have been enough to alleviate the problem when traveling to the US.

I see no mention outside of his detainment and the verification of his situation that he was treated badly or disrespectful in any way. Or is your "ZOMG! PROBABLE TERRORIST!" comment code fo

Seriously though, how often do border guards ever catch anyone? All that frisking and undressing and do they EVER catch anyone? I feel certain that if they ever did, it would be all over the media. As evidenced here, this pointless pompous nonsense reaches the pinacle of its expression on the way into the US.

Not the same thing, but there _were_ those "mental giants" that recently tried to blow up a temple in NYC, and shoot down a military plane with a rocket launcher. Thing is, these geniuses didn't realize that they were being scammed by the Feds the entire time: the "C4" wasn't real, nor was the "rocket."

Ok, they had intent, and their motive was certainly questionable. But their means were non-existent, and they weren't even smart enough to realize that. At best, these punks should be called "unsocial reta

Sure, they were dumb. Most criminals are. Most terrorists aren't exactly the sharpest marbles in the sack, either. How dumb do you have to be for someone to convince you that blowing yourself up or flying an airplane into a building is a good idea and will help you achieve your goals?

However, they only failed because the supplier they found was an undercover Fed rather than someone who would supply actual weapons. As for reality, the rocket was real; it was just disarmed. As for the C-4, it's probably possible to supply fake C-4 that behaves just like the real thing except it won't actually explode. It's not surprising that they didn't test the stuff; they had no reason to, believing it to be authentic, and testing C-4 is likely to attract a lot of attention.

The bottom line is, they *are* terrorists. They did have a concrete plan to carry out attacks. They attempted to carry out that plan. They were caught by good undercover police work. To try and say they aren't terrorists because they were arrested before they could blow anything up is like trying to say somebody isn't a drug dealer because he gets arrested after selling to a narc.

You miss my point. This was more like a boxing match between someone incapable of defending himself and a heavyweight champion. The champ won - surprise! - and then bragged about it.

Calling these guys terrorists is about as accurate as calling the Keystone Kops "law enforcement officials." Put it this way: the Feds weren't afraid of supplying this material to these guys and letting them loose. If they were potentially a real threat, the Feds would've picked them up well before they even got close to the

Secondly, he didn't just walk up to them, open his trench coat and say "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" They were looking for stuff, so the FBI put forward a supplier.

Actually, the informant, Shahed Hussain, did go around saying things like that, in this case and another one, and federal agents have set up other people like that.

Hussain was a Pakistani immigrant who went undercover for the feds seven years ago to avoid deportation after being convicted of fraud. He was going around to mosques offering people money. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/nyregion/23informant.html [nytimes.com] And by being a government informant, (1) Hussain was getting paid a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars, as I recall) (2) He got out of prosecution and possibly prison for his own crimes (3) Instead of being deported, he was allowed to stay in the country, which for a lot of immigrants is most important of all.

Hussain was responsible for a conviction in another case http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11plot.html [nytimes.com] in which he entrapped two men who never had anything to do with terrorism before, and who never could have gotten such weapons before, by loaning them $50,000.

Finally, if an FBI agent *had* walked up and said "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" and they said yes, then got busted, that'd stand up in court. Offering an illegal item for sale is not legal entrapment.

Well, depending on the circumstances it can be entrapment. If the person had no predisposition to commit a crime, and the FBI agent entices him by using an unreasonable amount of pressure, such as offering a huge amount of money, it can be entrapment. It's a jury question.

Cf. John Delorean's coke bust.

DeLorean was acquitted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_De_Lorean [wikipedia.org] That's a good example of entrapment, because DeLorean was offered an unreasonable amount of money, in desperate circumstances, to do something he would not otherwise do.

Or anybody who gets busted for soliciting prostitution when the prostitute turns out to be a police officer.

If someone solicits a prostitute, that would show predisposition to commit a crime.

In contrast, a person who has never committed an act of terrorism, and has nothing to do with terrorists, who is enticed to take a large amount of money and then informed that it is for terrorist purposes, is entrapped, under the law.

Unfortunately, it's easy to manipulate juries with prejudicial issues, such as the defendant's race and religion. Right now, many jurors will be prejudiced against Muslim Arabs, and it's relatively easy for a prosecutor to get a conviction against them by using scare tactics.

A good example was Hemant Lakhani, whose case was the subject of a good program on This American LIfe. http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1088 [thislife.org] One of the jurors agreed that he was entrapped, but she felt pressured by the other jurors to go along. Most people who listen to that broadcast would come to the same conclusion. But Lakhani is in jail for the rest of his life.

Next time around, the time will come for them to be prejudiced against another ethnic group or religion.

You show me a person who says "Yeah, sure" to an offer of blowing up a Synagogue for cash and I'll show you a person with a predisposition to do that anyway.

If you had read psychologists like Stanley Milgram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_milgram [wikipedia.org] you'd know that most people could be manipulated to do exactly what the Nazis did by someone who is a skillful manipulator -- and informers are skillful manipulators. If you read testimony at these trials, you'll see that the defendants made innocent decisions that would have seemed reasonable at the time, and one thing led to another.

If you had been in that situation, an undercover agent might have manipulated y

An alert border guard caught a guy trying to get across the border with a bunch of bomb stuff. This case with the finger prints doesn't sound like a case of anybody being "alert" - but for my money, training people to detect and investigate is far better than the ridiculous security theater we usually see - taking off shoes and having jars of plum jam confiscated.

What do you want them to do? We had a guy who hid a big enough bomb in his shoes to (probably) take a plane down. And we had a full-blown plot to sneak binary explosives on in shampoo bottles. What's your solution to stopping those kinds of attacks without bothering anybody's plum jam?

When I was getting my CCW permit, which requires fingerprinting, there was an old man there. The police fingerprinters were failing to get fingerprints from him, I assumed because of his old wrinkled skin. Since he legally cannot get a CCW permit without fingerprints on file, he was basically being discriminated against on the basis that the fancy fingerprinting machine that the police station bought happened to not do the correct song and dance when he put his fingers on it.

It's similar to the situation with breathalyzers where if the machine beeps or not can be the difference between you going to jail or driving home. Our judges have been replaced by robotic imposters, and I imagine it will get worse in the future.

IANAL, but my understanding is that refusal laws apply only after an arrest. Refusal to take a roadside breathalyzer does, however, constitute probably cause for arrest. Once you are placed under arrest as a result of either refusing or failing a roadside breathalyzer, you are given an evidentiary test, using with a more reliable machine. Refusing this test is what triggers the refusal laws.

Again, IANAL, but it seems better to always refuse a test if you know you're going to fail. Failure to blow is a civil penalty. A DUI is a criminal conviction that can haunt you for the rest of your life.

My wife had to get a special exemption to sit for the bar exam because the state police couldn't take her fingerprints, which were necessary for conducting the required criminal background check. She has no idea why her fingerprints are virtually nonexistent.

I knew an guy who had worked with air conditioners for years- he couldn't be fingerprinted either, and that was with the old style ink method. The chemicals he worked with burned off the surface of the skin on his fingers.

My wife worked at a biotech company. She had to wash her hands constantly for her job, and her fingerprints just washed off eventually.... But their security system to gain access to the building involved a fingerprint scanner and PIN.

She had to get a security exception to get into the building every single day.

So did they subject your wife to some sort of extraordinary, non-fingerprint-related background check? Or do they just shrug and exempt people from the requirement if the person doesn't have fingerprints?

As if the prints would return this quick?
How stupid can you be if such a specific case takes 4 hours?
DHS senior personnel thinks that they NEED fingerprints to let someone enter? [fascist state proof #1]
DHS is unsure if they can send him back because there are no prints. [cluelessness proof #1]
Etc.
Of course the man didn't tell them he was taking medicine etc.

In an episode of the original Adam West "Batman" series, the caped crusader was performing a high-tech fingerprint scan on all the citizens leaving some sort of event. Along comes a long-nosed fellow -- obviously The Penguin, since his disguise was about as effective as Superman's "Clark Kent" cover. Batman attempts the fingerprint scan, but the man has no fingerprints.

"Yes, I believe that's what the surgeon used," replies the ersatz innocent civilian.

Batman lets him go, but confides to Robin that he knows it's the Penguin -- but now that the dastardly enemy thinks he's slipped the trap, he will now lead them to the bad guys' secret lair.

Obviously, the TSA should have done the same with this guy. Then, they could have found the entire Al Qaida leadership, probably meeting in a rakishly tilted room, behind the one-way mirror in a seedy magic shop.

Reminds me of an old episode of Battlestar Galactica 1980 [wikipedia.org] where the young heroes got busted by the sheriff and accused of filing away their fingerprints to avoid identification. The flying motorcycles were cool.

I was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2005, and after surgery I did the chemotherapy thing. One of my drugs was Xeloda, which is the marketing name for capecitabine, the drug this guy is taking.

The problem mentioned in TFA is Hand-Foot Syndrome (HFS) or palmer-palmer erythrodysesthesia. Capecitabine causes redness, swelling, a rash, and burning pain in the hands and feet - and sometimes elsewhere such as joints and genitals. In bad cases the skin peels and you get blisters, ulcers and sores in the affected areas. This is because some of the drug leaks out of the capillaries and damages the surrounding tissues, and you have a lot of capillaries close to the surface in the hands and feet.

There are drugs (Vitamin B6, corticosteroids, dimethyl sulfoxide) that can help sometimes - but they didn't for me. Walking became extremely painful, and my hands were constantly hot and painful, although I didn't lose my fingerprints as far as I know. Everything returned to normal some months after chemotherapy completed.

I really sympathize with this guy. Dealing with immigration headaches while having bad hand-foot syndrome would have been a total hassle for me. Even standing up for a few minutes was torture.

I wrote about this in my cancer blog [blogspot.com] a few months back:

I lost some feeling in my hands and feet due to the various chemotherapy drugs I've taken over the past five years. I also lost my fingerprints thanks to Xeloda, which irritates the palms and soles in a reaction called hand-foot syndrome [chemocare.com].

When I went to Disney World in 2007 I found that the entry gates use fingerprint scanners to ensure that the person using an electronic ticket is the same one who registered it. The scanner choked when I tried to regi

Fingerprint and photograph, yes -- with a few exceptions. The big one is that (most) Canadian citizens are exempt. As well, individuals younger than 14 or older than 79 can skip the ten card and mugshot.

You get the invasion of privacy even if you're just passing through a U.S. airport to make a connection to another country.

My sister has Nethertons Syndrome. It's relevant implication for this case is that her skin is replaced faster than normal. This causes her to have weak if any fingerprints.

When visiting Florida for christmas last year my entire family was held back for about half an hour. Only after the "security person" had consulted his superior, and that superior had consulted yet another superior, were this 16 year old obvious thread to national security allowed to pass into America. They also tried to wipe her fingertips with alcohol. Very pleasant on what you can compare to a first to second degree burn.